I am just finishing up a great month on peds outpatient. Here are some notes / lessons learned / comments to parents:

(Please note that I am a parent and usually am pretty resistant to judging parents)

1. “Sexy” is not an appropriate nickname for your three year old daughter.

2. Please try to remember to turn off your phones, parents. Answering and saying “Yeah, hey, I’m at the doctor with the kid, bro, let me call you back” while I am examining your child is, to say the least, distracting. That’s what the vibrate mode / voicemail is for.

3. If your kid is coming in for an asthma exacerbation, and currently has an asthma inhaler at home, trying to use the inhaler before coming in and then actually remembering what the name of it is when you come in (hey, even bringing it in!) is a great idea. I love the parents who bring in the bottles of meds.

4. It is amazing how wide the range can be of what worries parents. There are parents who will bring in a kid for one day of clear runny nose, no fever, no sore throat. There are parents who will fight with you about going to the hospital when their kid seems to have something clearly wrong that needs further workup that can’t be handled adequately in an outpatient setting.

5. I was happy and amazed how cute the kids were to me. Even the cranky ones. Even the ones who cried at the site of my white coat.

6. Parents, please don’t use the vaccines as a threat of punishment for bad behavior. And, please don’t use them as some sort of sick joke to scare your kids and get a laugh as I am coming at them with the stethoscope.

OK, as of Tuesday, I am swinging to the opposite end of the cycle of life. On to Geriatrics. Wish me luck!

4 responses to “Notes from pediatrics outpatient clinic”

Hilarious! Good luck on geriatrics – I loved that rotation and considered it briefly. Not so much peds, but I’ve always been much better at relating to my own kids than anyone else’s. And the parents intimidated the hell out of me (I also did not yet have children).